Yesterday a commenter at my blog chastised me, saying my “gushing over Herman Cain is starting to get embarrassing.” One of the knocks on Cain’s candidacy is that he has never held public office and, therefore, is presumably un-electable. That kind of pre-emptive discounting of an otherwise appealing candidate sticks in my craw, especially after a year in which voters elected so many Tea Party-backed Republican challengers who had also never held public office. So I replied today to the negativity:

In a David-vs.-Goliath situation, you don’t start by trying to calculate the odds of success, because the odds are liable to be so daunting as to inspire helpless despair. But let me ask you this: What were Herman Cain’s odds in 2006, when the doctors diagnosed him with Stage 4 cancer? Think about that before you say Cain can’t win. . . .